And there was never a set list or a ticket charge. Or a ticket, for that matter.

See, musical Nashville is special, in large part because so many world-class musicians live within an easy drive of each other. And musicians are special.

They like what they do for a living, to the point that they’ll do it for pleasure. Plumbers don’t gather on Sundays to plumb for fun. Accountants don’t have number-crunching parties. But in Nashville, for many years, musicians gathered at the Belmont Boulevard home of famed producer Cowboy Jack Clement and at the Franklin Pike home of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs and his wife, Louise, to laugh and smile and eat and play music.

These gatherings were joyful and casual, which is a good thing: Had they carried a whiff of formality, they would have been of terrifying weight. We’re talking about the greatest of the great, in unique conjunctions, playing together. Spouses, children and friends were invited, but the goal wasn’t to entertain the nonmusicians in attendance. There really wasn’t any goal at all. Just being together was mission accomplished.

The athletic equivalent might be the 1992 U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” scrimmages, where Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley and other future Hall of Famers went up against each other away from television cameras. But even that was competition. These Nashville gatherings were fellowship, not gamesmanship.

As for a rock ’n’ roll equivalent, there’s probably not one.

There’s a good documentary called “Festival Express” about a train tour that featured The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and others. But even there, performers were being paid to be on that train. Levon Helm’s “Midnight Ramble” shows at his Woodstock, N.Y., home were joyful confluences, but tickets were sold and the musicians were (rightly) interested in pleasing an audience.

Johnny and June Carter Cash used to host “guitar pulls” at their Hendersonville home, where Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Joni Mitchell, George Hamilton IV, Gordon Lightfoot and many other writers came for music and hospitality.

John Hartford’s home on the banks of the Cumberland was home to epic New Year’s jams, and it may be that other groundbreaking musicians opened their homes for such sessions. (I’m told that musicians don’t always invite journalists to their big shindigs, though that’s difficult to believe.)

So what can we do about all this?

Well, I just got an email about someone’s rich uncle who died in Nigeria: Apparently, this guy needs my account information so that the uncle’s millions can be deposited in my name. If all that works out, I’m going to buy late Country Music Hall of Famer Cowboy Jack’s house — which has an upstairs recording studio built by the great Mark Howard — and revive it as a creative center, using Cowboy Jack’s motto as a mission statement: “We’re in the fun business. If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing our job.” All I need is a little more than $1.28 million.

You, dear reader, may purchase the Scruggs home, which in the past was also owned by the late fellow Country Music Hall of Famers — and former spouses — George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

Listed at $3.5 million, it is a gorgeous, rambling estate with room enough to invite dozens of musicians over to convene and collaborate. There’s a big iron gate out front, and I used to get giddy just watching from my driver’s seat when the thing opened: Driving through that gate was like passing through the turnstile on opening day of baseball season.

I’m counting hard on that rich Nigerian uncle money coming through, but if the real estate stuff doesn’t work out for us, maybe we can open our own homes.

Maybe we can visit each other in person, rather than just checking in through social media. Maybe bring-your-own-booze becomes bring-your-own-instrument (though it’s not an either/or: Instrument cases have lots of booze-hiding compartments).

Maybe we turn our houses into Nashville’s greatest music venues, just for the fun of it. Just because we can. Just because we’re Nashville, and our houses sound better than the houses in Wichita. We’re in the fun business, and it’s time to get to work.

Click to see a gallery of Ray Price over the years. Here, performs at the Grand Ole Opry in 2007 (photo: Shauna Bittle/The Tennessean)

Late Country Music Hall of Famer Ray Price's "Beauty Is...," an album recorded with famed producer Fred Foster while Price was fighting cancer, will be released April 15 on AmeriMonte Records. Price, who pioneered a highly influential shuffling country sound, died last December at age 87.

A three-song digital EP featuring Price singing "This Thing of Ours," "I Wish I Was 18 Again" and "Beauty Lies In The Eyes of the Beholder" (with harmony vocals from Vince Gill) will be available beginning March 16.

Martina McBride also sings on "Beauty Is," an album filled with gentle love songs. Price called Foster in 2012 and asked the producer to helm one more project.

CLICK THE PHOTO ABOVE to see a gallery from "All For The Hall." Here, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris and Ann Wilson perform as the Country Music Hall of Fame presents the 2014 concert benefiting The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum at Club Nokia at L.A. Live in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, March 4, 2014 (Brandon Clark/ABImages)

LOS ANGELES — The living room, Emmylou Harris often reminds. Keep it close to the living room.

By that, Harris means that country music should be spiritual, not technical. It should retain the spirit of friends sharing songs in a home. It should be loose and vibrant, not perfect. It should be more communion than performance.

Tuesday night at Club Nokia, Harris and fellow Country Music Hall of Famer Vince Gill brought the living room to downtown Los Angeles, anchoring a guitar pull not unlike the ones Harris and then-husband Brian Ahern used to host in the 1970s at the Beverly Hills home where they recorded Harris’ early-career masterpieces.

Proceeds from this “All For The Hall” fundraising concert were aided by an auction that featured autographed Gibson and Epiphone guitars, Southwest Airlines travel vouchers, CMA Music Festival tickets and even an opportunity to appear in a “Nancy” comic strip.

“Nashville is this amazing town, with this great songwriting community, and it also has this incredible museum,” said Rita Wilson, who has lately been spending time in Nashville, writing songs with notables including Jessi Alexander and Harris’ former Nash Rambler band member, Jon Randall.Continue reading →

Fast Access Passes, which provide access to advance seating and allow festivalgoers to bypass individual cover charges, go on sale at 10 a.m. today for $90 for NSAI members and $100 for non-members. Passes are limited and sell out fast. See the schedule as it stands, and find details on festival passes, at www.TinPanSouth.com.

Individual tickets to shows, ranging from $10 to $25, will be available at the door on a first-come, first-served basis.

“Those are masterpieces,” said Franklin, a renowned steel guitar player. “And for (Haggard) to hear them, the fear would be (he would say), ‘Oh my God, what did you do to the song. Where did my melody go?’ When he responded in the way that he did, I teared up and I know Vince did.”

Haggard loved the interpretations and wrote the album’s liner notes. Gill said that during the recording process, he got positive texts from people who work for Haggard including, “The old man is smiling.”

Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores will release “Bakersfield: Deluxe Edition” on Jan. 27. The new version of “Bakersfield," which was originally released in 2013, contains four new tracks. Fans will find songs including “The Bottle Let Me Down,” “Foolin’ Around” and an instrumental song Gill wrote called “Buckin’ Merle.”

For this Tennessean interview, Franklin and Gill were seated in Gill’s home recording studio where they made the record. Gill answered the door in bare feet wearing a Belmont T-shirt and lead the way to the studio. Racks of guitars line a portion of the walls, vintage amplifiers are stacked in front of a stone fireplace and rows of Grammy Awards adorn shelves.

The open room, they said, was the perfect place to make the album because the lack of isolation walls allowed their sounds to bleed together and they could see each other.

“There’s nothing like seeing the way somebody is smiling to inspire you,” Gill said. “There was a great spirit about the excitement of playing those great songs, especially today. For the most part, no one gets to play this kind of music steeped in this history. Nothing about it felt like work. They played themselves. Most musicians will tell you that great songs will always play themselves. You don’t have to struggle with a great song. Just get out of the way and let it be.”

Gill added: “It’s daunting taking on iconic records like this. It comes from such an honoring, reverent and beautiful place, it never felt anything but special.”

Vince Gill and Paul Franklin’s "Bakersfield" album takes new approaches to much-loved songs by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. (Photo: John Partipilo / The Tennessean)

Gregg Allman performed at All My Friends: Celebrating The Songs and Voice of Gregg Allman on Friday, Jan. 10, 2014 in Atlanta, Ga. (Photo by Dan Harr/Invision/AP)

ATLANTA (AP) - An all-star lineup of musicians feted Gregg Allman Friday night at a tribute concert heralding the southern rock luminary and the blues rock that influenced many artists to follow his band's early 1970s success.

Randy Scruggs, son of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, stands near a statue of his father at the Earl Scruggs Center in honor of his father during a tour that took place after the Earl Scruggs Center dedication ceremony at Central United Methodist Church on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014 in Shelby, N.C. (photo: Associated Press / The Star, Ben Earp)

In his 88 years, Earl Scruggs found a new way to play the banjo, an instrument that was clattering toward antiquity until he gave it a new and eloquent voice.

In so doing, Scruggs helped create a new form of country music now recognized as “bluegrass,” he inspired thousands of players and millions of songs and he altered the course of American popular music.

Now, a year and 10 months after his death, Scruggs and his singular legacy are helping to rejuvenate the once-decaying uptown square in Shelby, N.C., the town where he worked making sewing thread in the Lily Mill, and where he left in 1945 to head west — first to Knoxville, then to Nashville — to fulfill his destiny.

She came to Middle Tennessee from Pennsylvania at 14, and in the ensuing near-decade she has become an international superstar, and a wealthy young woman. Those are rare and laudable things, but they’ve been done before.

Swift, though, is unprecedented. She came to popular attention with Top 10 country hit “Tim McGraw” when she was 16, becoming the first mid-teenage singer-songwriter to do so since Janis Ian hit the Top 20 with “Society’s Child” in 1967. And Swift has made the most graceful transition from teen stardom to adult music career since Brenda Lee, who recorded signature hit “I’m Sorry” at age 15 and maintained an impeccable image on her way to the country music and rock and roll halls of fame.

Yet these are not the reasons that The Tennessean recognizes Swift as the 2013 Tennessean of the Year.

Swift has become a worldwide ambassador for Tennessee’s capital city, an example to millions of young (and not-so-young) people of how to turn damaged feelings into healing creativity, and a financial booster to some of the city’s most important institutions. In October, the Taylor Swift Education Center opened at the greatly expanded Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, courtesy of Swift’s $4 million gift, the largest individual artist gift in the museum’s history.

The center, which opened ahead of schedule in October, spans two floors and includes three classrooms, a learning lab and, coming in 2014, an interactive exhibit gallery. It gives the museum seven times more space for education.

And this month, on her birthday, Swift offered up $100,000 to the Nashville Symphony, an organization that endured severe financial uncertainty in 2013. For the second consecutive year, Swift topped DoSomething.org’s list of the top 20 charitable celebrities, and much of her generosity is intended for the betterment of Nashville.

“For her to believe in us, the hometown institutions, and to be focused on Nashville speaks volumes,” says Kyle Young, the director and chief executive officer of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “How often do you think she’s approached to do things, all over the world? So it means so much for her to believe in us and think that investments here would help the city she clearly cares so much about.”

The ambassador

In many ways, Swift carries Nashville and its music all over the world.